VOCAL Alliance Launches, Urges EU Regulatory Compliance Over Pushback

The new VOCAL Alliance logo.

A new consortium of civil society organizations under the acronym VOCAL (Voice of Organizations in Coffee Alliance) launched today, challenging the coffee industry’s prevailing positions on regulatory compliance.

In its first act, the group released a report calling for coffee’s private sector to embrace new European regulatory realities affecting the coffee trade, rather than calling for enforcement delays.

Titled “Coffee’s Regulatory Blend,” the report characterizes the industry’s response to environmental, economic and social issues plaguing the coffee sector as being “too little, too late,” and marked by “resistance, disengagement and misinformation.”

The report comes 89 days ahead of the scheduled enforcement of the new European anti-deforestation supply chain law known as EUDR, which is expected to dramatically affect the trade of green coffee in the EU, and, by extension, the world.

It also tackles three other EU regulations coming into place: the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the Green Claims Directive.

The report argues that, taken as a whole, these new European laws are long overdue and “essential for leveling the playing field and guiding the coffee industry towards enhanced human rights and environmental protection.”

Contrasting Positions on EUDR

The report stands in notable contrast to the predominant public stances adopted by many private sector consortiums, NGOs and many farmer advocacy groups calling for the delayed enforcement of EUDR.

A consortium of large European roasters, Fairtrade International and the head of the International Coffee Organization are among the dozens of parties who have, in their own terms, urged delays in regulatory enforcement, while warning of unintended consequences of the law.

The most common refrain is that large swaths of the coffee-producing world may be shut out of future European trade, resulting in disastrous economic effects, particularly for the world’s most vulnerable farmer populations who may have the least capacity for compliance.

In its inaugural position report, VOCAL acknowledges these potential unintended consequences, especially for small-scale farmers, yet reassigns culpability to the private sector, as opposed to the laws themselves.

“Adapting to mandatory sustainability will pose challenges for many smallscale farmers, who need both financial and technical support,” the report states. “The risk of excluding these farmers from the market stems not from regulations, but from company decisions.”

Who is VOCAL?

Self-described as a a “network of civil society groups working towards sustainability in coffee,” VOCAL is a sister organization of the Netherlands-based VOICE Network, a watchdog and advocacy group that has focused on social and environmental issues in the cocoa sector for more than a decade.

While the membership of VOCAL is in its “formative phase,” contributors to the inaugural report included the organizations Coffee Watch, Fairfood, Fern, Forests of the World, Inkota Netzwerk, Oxfam Belgium, Public Eye and Rikolto. The work was supported by Ethos Agriculture and the VOICE Network.

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